NextiraOne France to modernise IT infrastructure for No.1 healthcare provider on the Island of Réunion (SAMU)

SAMU has an very wide area of responsibility on Réunion. Apart from its traditional provision of emergency medical aid, SAMU 974, along with PGHM, is also responsible for medical aid in mountain rescue, for medical aid at sea and for airborne health evacuations. It is also involved in the French-speaking islands of the Indian Ocean during natural or technological disasters.

In order to be able to answer the 220,000 calls SAMU of Réunion receives each year (about 600 - 800 calls per day, with up to 1,000 on Sundays), the organisation decided to modernise the handling and control of incoming calls at its Centre 15. There had been no updating of the equipment in nearly ten years.

The existing solution at SAMU of Réunion did not allow the 60 doctors and 30 call handlers to prioritise incoming calls according to the seriousness of the call and to respond accordingly and quickly. Irrespective of whether the caller was reporting a heart attack or toothache, the incoming call was being given the same priority.

To meet this challenge, NextiraOne France proposed the implementation of two complementary solutions to meet the operational requirements of SAMU: one for the telephony and the other for the Centaure 15 software, to introduce advanced telephony.

Calls are managed through the Genesys applications suite and routed intelligently. This handles the types of calls and their severity. In this way care staff or fire-fighters are automatically recognised and their calls are handled with a different level of priority from callers who have told the voice server whether their call is for information or an emergency. The voice server can operate under different scenarios depending on the workload of Centre 15, or in the event of a disaster.

The call handlers and medical managers have a detailed control panel on their PC showing the operations of Centre 15, using the MediQ application. At any time they can place a call into a ‘waiting room’ (call hold), retrieve the call and change the priority. By hovering the mouse over the call, they can see the data available on the files of Centaure 15, which is synchronised with MediQ.

The entire system is tracked and recorded. In this way Centre 15 can produce statistics and respond to the recommendations of the MeaH (the French national hospitals' skills centre).

"Implementing these solutions will provide quick, easy access, as well as visibility on our performance. We will be able to know how many people hang up before having been able to speak with a call handler, or to know the waiting time before calls are put through,” explains Prof. Xavier Combes, head of SAMU of Réunion.

"The close cooperation between the teams of NextiraOne, SAMU 974 and the IT department of the Réunion Medical Centre have allowed us to create a secure IT solution suited to SAMU's 24/7 operations, 365 days a year," adds Dominique Talandier, Director of IT Systems at the Réunion Medical Centre.

"NextiraOne has allowed us to have a single point of contact for all the solutions installed. This simplicity has been a critical criterion for us in our choice of service provider. NextiraOne has provided close support to SAMU of Réunion in carrying out the change. We also have a number of additional benefits such as customised, personalised training, the provision of alarm response procedures, and support for going into operation. This way the users can handle calls without delay," concludes Dr. Arnaud Bourdé, head of the project for SAMU of Réunion.